Simon Mann, the colourful mercenary and ex-SAS officer jailed for leading the so-called Wonga Coup involving Sir Mark Thatcher in central Africa 20 years ago has died, can reveal.
Old Etonian Mann, who also served in the Scots Guards after Sandhurst, was one of a group of 70 mercenaries arrested in Zimbabwe for attempting to stage a coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea in 2004.
Businessman Sir Mark, son of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was later arrested in South Africa and, like Mann, admitted a part in the coup attempt.
It is believed that multi-millionaire and father-of-seven Mann was exercising in the gym when he died this week, aged 72.
Mann was born into a life of privilege and had a distinguished military career before his entanglement in the coup.
His father George captained the England cricket team in the 1940s and was an heir to the Watney Mann brewing empire.
After Sandhurst, he served in the Scots Guards and SAS in Cyprus, Germany, Norway and Northern Ireland, volunteering as a reservist in the first Gulf war in 1991.
In 1996, Mann formed the mercenary or ‘Private Military Company’ Sandline with former Scots Guards Colonel Tim Spicer, operating in Angola, Sierra Leone.
In 2004, Mann hit the headlines when he and 69 other ex-soldiers were arrested during a stop-off at Harare Airport to be loaded with £100k of weapons and equipment intended to engineer the coup in Equatorial Guinea and overthrow the government of President Teodoro Obiang.
Mann and the other conspirators claimed they were merely flying to the Democratic Republic of Congo to provide security for diamond mines, but after a trial in Harare, he was given seven years for attempting to buy arms for an alleged coup, while 66 other men were acquitted.
Thatcher, nicknamed ‘Scratcher’, meanwhile, was arrested at home in Cape Town and eventually pleaded guilty to ‘negligently supplying financial assistance’ to the plot.
The coup was financed by Lebanese fixer Eli Calil, nicknamed ‘Smelly’ by his ex-public school co-conspirators, who later died falling downstairs at his home in Holland Park, West London.
President Obiang promised that he would eat Mann’s testicles and drag his naked body through the streets, should he ever get the chance.
In 2006, Coup! a TV movie was made about the affair, written by actor and comedy writer John Fortune, of Bremner, Bird and Fortune fame, starring Jared Harris as Mann and Robert Bathurst as Thatcher.
Then in 2007, a court in Zimbabwe ruled that Mann should be extradited to Equatorial Guinea after a shady agreement between the two governments branded the ‘Oil for Mann’ deal.
The then Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe secured a large amount of oil from Guinea, widely believed to be in return for sending Mann north to meet his fate.
Multi-millionaire Mann was thrown into the notorious hell-hole of Black Beach Prison, where he was clapped in leg irons and would serve less than two years of a 34-year sentence, though he suffered with malaria more than once, caged in a tiny cell in solitary confinement.
Back home, Mann’s loyal wife Amanda, fighting with others for her husband’s release, displayed unquenchable spirit, acquiring a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: ‘A man is for Christmas. Not for life.’
In 2009 he was granted a ‘complete pardon on humanitarian grounds’ by President Obiang, the man he had tried to depose, and settled in the New Forest with his wife Amanda, but last year the pair were reported to have split.
Last year, the Mail’s Richard Eden reported that Mann had left Amanda, mother of four of his seven children, who campaigned tirelessly for his release and was apparently being comforted by a woman more than 20 years his junior.
‘Simon and Amanda have split up,’ a friend said, adding that Mann has moved out of the house on the south coast where they’ve lived since shortly after his release in 2009.
Mann’s next scheme was growing cannabis in North Macedonia, it was reported.
Eden reported: ‘They are getting divorced,’ the chum tells me, saying that the marriage has been ‘very difficult’ ever since Mann’s return from Africa.
‘They decided to stay together until their youngest child left home.’
More recently, Mann’s polo-playing son Jack, by his first marriage, was named as Prince Harry’s ‘real best man’ was in the news.
He had an intended business trip to Libya interrupted when he and colleagues attempted to fly in from Malta.
The authorities decided that their paperwork needed to be ‘rectified’ – a process which took five days.
Last year, the Daily Telegraph interviewed Mann who claimed that Thatcher’s role in the coup attempt was far more than just a ‘negligent financier’.
The plot was seeded in August 2003, when Calil summoned Mann to his grand mansion in Chelsea, after being approached by Severo Moto, the exiled opposition leader in Equatorial Guinea, who wanted to overthrow the tyrannical Obiang.
Mann claimed Calil told him that King Juan Carlos of Spain, of which Equatorial Guinea is a former colony, and the then-prime minister of Spain José Maria Aznar, knew about the coup and approved of it.
As a reward, Mann would have access to oil rights once Moto was in power. Mann was also attracted by the danger and adventure that the plan involved, and believed that removing a despotic dictator would justify the ethics of the job. He told Calil he would do it.
Putting together a team of mercenaries – armed with guns, rocket launchers and mortars – to carry out the coup would cost $2.5 million, he calculated, but Calil’s funds were frozen due to a criminal investigation in France.
Calil introduced Mann to a businessman who would become a silent partner in the scheme, but Mann wanted his own man and approached Thatcher.
Sir Mark was an old friend; a close neighbour in Cape Town, where both men had homes; and, the Telegraph reported, something of an SAS groupie. During a walk on Table Mountain, Mann briefed Sir Mark on the plot and asked if he would invest.
‘Mark was incredibly enthusiastic’, Mann told the Telegraph. ‘But he was not just keen to share the spoils of our adventure in Equatorial Guinea – he wanted to play an active role in [planning] the operation.’
Mann needed a helicopter for the fast movement of supplies and troops and Sir Mark, a trained helicopter pilot, had the connections and the cash to source the required aircraft.